Comment by pjc50
8 hours ago
There's a book "The Unaccountability Machine" that HN may be interested in. Takes a much broader approach across management systems.
8 hours ago
There's a book "The Unaccountability Machine" that HN may be interested in. Takes a much broader approach across management systems.
That famous Bible verse, "there is nothing new under the sun", comes to mind. Even most of the problems with computers and computer systems - especially distributed ones - and information processing, and all problems at the interface layer between those systems and people, are something we've already been dealing with for hundreds of years. For many of those we even developed effective solutions, that most people don't realize exist.
It takes a little frame shift to see this: one has to realize that bureaucracy is a computing system, built on a runtime made of people instead of silicon, storing data on forms and documents, invoking procedure calls through paper shuffling, executing programs written in legalese, as rules and procedures and laws.
Accountability shifting? "The program won't let me do that" is just a new, more intense flavor of "this is the company/government policy". The underlying goals remain the same - building a reliable system from unreliable parts, a system to realize some goals - while maintaining control of and visibility into it, all without having to personally micromanage every aspect. Introductions of computers into bureaucracy didn't change its fundamental nature; making process more robust and reducing endpoint variation (i.e. individual autonomy of the workers) just makes it scale better.
Hell, even AI - at least at this point[0] - isn't really a new thing either. Once you allow yourself to anthropomorphize LLMs a bit and realize they are effectively "People on a Chip", it becomes clear what their role in a computing system is, and that we already have experience dealing with their flaky, unreliable nature.
And from that perspective, it's clear as day that company blaming AI for a fuckup is just the most recent flavor of shifting blame to a subcontractor.
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[0] - Things will meaningfully change if and when we get to the point of AIs being given moral or legal status as people. Though in all honesty, this wouldn't be a completely new situation either - more like a new take on social and political issues humanity has been dealing with ever since first two ancient tribes found themselves contesting the same piece of land.